Making the most of your pictures with the contrado photo book.
Ordering information
No software or registration needed
Send us a CD with your payment
Call us on 020 8960 4567 with any questions, or use our contact form to send us an email.
photo book fact
We use 100% cotton headbands chosen to match book's colour palette - see pic, the headband is the bit at the top of the spine. Headbands are essential to preserving the binding of the book, protecting the spine when a book is pulled by a finger from the shelf. They are very decorative also!
Read more facts about our photo books.
Your photos and images
We want you to get the best photo book possible from us, and below is some information you may find useful. For advanced (or brave!) users, please also visit our advanced artworking page.
Files from a digital camera
Generally, these present no problems. Digital cameras are so good nowadays
that you have nothing to worry about, unless you have set the resolution
to a low size. A quick look at them on screen should
Scanned files
To be safe, it is recommend that you scan in the files at 600dpi (there is an equation for you to be able to work out the exact resolution you need, but 600dpi should cover you for any eventuality). When scanning, be wary of automatic image correction or applying filters. Generally speaking, if it looks alright on screen, it will print well.
Stuff too close to the edge
Bear in mind when you submit your images that items close to the edges are liable to be cropped.
Red eye removal
We are happy to do this on your images for no extra charge, but please bring
it to our attention if an image has red eye just in case we miss it when
creating your book. See pic: red eye reduced on one eye for comparison.
Portrait or Landscape
portrait=taller than wide (for example taken with the camera rotated to 90°. We find the majority of pictures are taken in landscape form, but there are occasions when a portrait image is desired. Our default is to rotate this image on the page, but for whatever reason you may not want this. Please make this clear in your order (When you upload your images: you will be able to add a note for each image). If you would like the image to remain vertical this will mean white space either side.
Images that go over spreads
This is inadvisable as some slippage and skewing always occurs. It can work OK with landscapes but even so you will always see that it butts up in the middle imperfectly.
Making a complicated layout
The Contrado photo book was envisaged originally to be a one picture - one
page product. Nice and simple! We have found though that some people would
like much more complicated layouts. You can either do these yourself according
to these instructions, or by
all means use our scrapbooking service.
File types
We recommend you use jpg files as they give a reasonable quality and excellent compression. Not so important if you are sending us a CD, but you will be cursing the internet if you try to upload 50 forty meg tiffs! With a jpg, save the quality as "high" or "maximum" and you will not notice the difference between that and an uncompressed image!
We prefer CMYK.
